The bra we know today ws first patented in 1893 by Marie Tuck (although women in certain cultures had been binding or lifting their breasts for thousands of years). In 1913 Mary Phelps Jacob created a backless bra to wear with her evening gown. This led her to patent her bra, but she only sold a few hundred of her design, and then sold the patent to Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. In the following 30 years, the company made over $15 million from this new creation.

Marie Tuck, Mary Phelps Jacob, and many women welcomed the bra as an alternative to the bone-crushing corset. The bra freed women from corsets, allowing them to be more mobile physically. The newest and most comfortable bra, especially for athletes, is the sports bra. Jogbra was the first of this kind, originally fashioned out of two jock straps sewn together.

Society has turned the bra, and women’s breasts, into highly sexualized things. Women are made to feel unsexy if they wear comfortable bras instead of lacey, satiny flowery, revealing, push-up style bras. Over time, bras have changed the way they shape the female body. In the 1920s, U.S. bras tightly compressed breasts to produce the straight, shapeless body in fashion at the time. By the mid-1930s, bras were shorter and designed to separate and lift the breasts. Since the 1990s, bras have increasingly included pads, water sacks, and/or wires to make women’s breasts look larger, higher, and closer together than they really are.

The bra is a technology created by women but, mostly, sold and marketed by men. To this day, only one of the major bra manufacturing companies (Bali, Hanes Her Way, Just My Size, Maidenform, Olga, Platex, Wonderbra) has a female CEO (Victoria’s Secret).

Suggested Readings:
C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes. New York: Dover, 1992.